Good news! I have finally gotten back on track with the 2025 One Woman Book Club. I was able to finish the May pick the first week of June, but aside from jotting down my initial not-so-positive thoughts so I didn't forget them, I wanted to sit with it a bit to see if my opinion on what I had hoped to be an engaging and captivating detective story would shift in a more positive light.
Sadly, The Darkest Flower did not live up to my expectations, which may have been unfair considering this is the author's debut book and the fact that the author is a lawyer herself.
But you really shouldn't take my word for it. The book has more than 10,000 reviews on Amazon with a 4.3 average rating and a 4.1 rating on Goodreads. Me? I'd give it a solid 3, maybe a 3.5 for the twist I actually didn't see coming.
This is a shorter book at just over 300 pages. It only took me a couple of days to read. It is told in dual point of view between the two main characters: defense attorney Allison Barton and her client, Kira Grant.
To avoid spoilers, skip to the end of this post.
***Spoilers***
The book jumps right into the story. Kira Grant, president of her son's elementary school's PTA, has been accused of poisoning another parent at the fifth grade graduation celebration. The actual event is not part of the storyline at all; the book starts several days after it happens.
The book begins with Kira hiring Allison Barton, a young defense attorney looking to break out from under the shadow of her unethical and misogynistic boss. The first chapter is surprisingly short, but gives us a pretty good idea of the type of person Kira is - a good actress who's skilled at hiding her innermost thoughts and feelings. That's really the only purpose of the chapter - to establish Kira's character and the conflict of the story - who tried to murder Summer Peerman?
Chapter two introduces us to Allison with a very specific scene in which she drops a client who she's discovered is a lying scumbag. We also learn that she's dubious of Kira's innocence but sees this case as the stepping stone she needs to branch out on her own.
The gist of the crime is this: Kira handed a cup of poisoned smoothie to Summer Peerman at the fifth grade graduation celebration. The smoothie contained wolfsbane, a highly toxic plant that Kira has been growing in her prized garden for years. Another member of the PTA, with whom Summer has butted heads, made the smoothies, and one other member, who also butted heads with Summer, was helping to hand them out.
The bottom line for the majority of the book is that no one knows how the wolfsbane got into the smoothie, which of Summer's "enemies" had motive enough to try to kill her, or if Summer was even the intended target. All of this remains a mystery through the trial, despite Allison and the opposing attorney's best efforts to get to the bottom of the crime.
As the book goes on and Alison does her investigation, it becomes more and more clear that something is off with Kira, but Allison can't quite put her finger on what it is. She still does her job, though, to prove that the state doesn't have any actual evidence against her client. Once the final witness has been called and both sides rest their cases, Kira takes Allison out for a drink and finally tells her the truth.
Kira is innocent of poisoning Summer, but the real story might just be worse. You see, Kira is a helicopter parent of the worst kind, determined to do whatever it takes so that her children will be the greatest. When it becomes clear to her that her son is not the greatest, Kira decides she needs to take out who she believes is his competition - Summer's son and her son's best friend. She had planned to put wolfsbane into his smoothie at the celebration but changed her mind when she witnessed the boy standing up to one of her son's bullies, who she didn't even know about. But another mom who had issues with Summer caught her throwing the wolfsbane away, and that mom put the poison into the cup that Summer drank.
Once Allison knows the truth, she risks her career by secretly warning Summer to keep her family away from Kira. She changes her closing argument in a last-ditch effort to warn the opposing attorney, but the judge still returns a not guilty verdict.
Just when you think the villain of the story is about to get away with it, Kira's husband swoops in with his own form of justice. See, when Kira testified on her own behalf, something she said clued her husband in to the truth, and he cannot sit back and do nothing, allowing this woman who he now knows is a monster to have influence over their children. So not only does he serve her with divorce papers but he also takes full custody of the children.
And Allison gets her happy ending. With her win, she's able to start her own practice.
***End Spoilers***
Alright, so here are my final thoughts on this book.
I really didn't like Kira -- which was the author's point, I'm sure -- but I despised her. She was truly evil, but it was like she didn't know she was evil. That said, I felt like her character development was much deeper than Allison's, which was a bit disappointing.
I found myself getting frustrated with Allison throughout much of the book. She was clearly intelligent but also not. I felt like she missed details that should have been obvious and didn't ask important questions that also felt pretty obvious. Maybe that was speaking to her inexperience? I don't know, but it didn't build much confidence in her attorney skills. Then, she was brilliant in the actual courtroom, so she was a bit of a contradiction.
Some other things that bothered me about Allison -- She didn't stand up for herself to the sexist pig she was working for. There was almost too much self-doubt about motherhood, which, while I understood it's overall impact for her character, I felt it took away from the main plot and was a big distraction in the investigative process; her focus felt divided at the most inconvenient times (as a mother, I get that you don't always get to choose when your kid and parenting choices are at the forefront of your mind, but it felt like an odd choice for the storyline). There was also this almost-romance with the opposing attorney, Emmett, that felt distracting and really surface level, mostly because we just didn't have enough information about him.
I will be the first to admit that the twist was brilliant, and I didn't see it coming at first. There were definitely lots of clues throughout the book to support it, but it took me awhile to see Kira's true motivation.
Finally, I found the ending to be unsatisfying. Sure, Kira didn't get away scot-free, but there was no real sense of justice, and I just know that Kira is not the type of character who would just stop being evil because of what happened at the end.
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